This Galewood couple — and a crew of skeletons — pay homage to Johnnie’s Beef for Halloween
When Susie Jendro and Mike Colesworthy moved into their Galewood Georgian in the summer of 2017, they were given some neighborly advice: Start getting ready for Halloween now.
The couple did not shrink from the challenge.
“We called his bluff,” Jendro told us this week.
It’s that kind of fearless enthusiasm that has the couple taking home first prize in the Chicago Sun-Times/WBEZ pop-up contest for Chicago’s best halloween house display.
The couple has created a replica of Johnnie’s Beef in Elmwood Park in the front yard of their home on the 1900 block of North Oak Park Avenue.
The display includes a smoke-belching chimney, skeletons as employees and guests, even a skeleton bird waiting to pounce on an Italian beef — the bread cunningly crafted from segments of a pool noodle.
“They are just a beloved establishment in our neighborhood,” Jendro said. “It’s either Al’s [Beef] or Johnnie’s. If you know, you know.” For the record, Jendro is a “dipped-hot-and-sweet” kind of gal. (Word of the display got back to the owners of Johnnie’s, who have donated food for the couple’s upcoming Halloween party, Jendro said.)
Jendro, who works in the software industry, and Colesworthy, an arcade-games maker, began collecting materials for their display in July.
“We quickly learned that this is the place for Halloween,” Jendro said. “We’ve gone big ever since [2017] and bigger every year.” Last year, they put together a display riffing on the local farmer’s market entitled “Ghoulwood Femurs Market.”
Much of the material for this year’s display came from stuff neighbors had tossed out, including a big sheet of clear plexiglass, repurposed to look like the steamy front window of Johnnie’s.
“We walk around the night before garbage night and look for people throwing out materials,” Jendro said. “Half the materials we sourced for free.”
With skeletons that are re-used year after year, their display cost about $350 in total, including wood, paint and fabric to make costumes for the skeleton employees.
The couple is by no means alone in wildly celebrating Halloween.
“There is a guy a couple of blocks away who has a whole circus, and it’s got a working Ferris wheel. It’s nuts,” Jendro said.
Jendro offers this advice to people who want to go beyond merely slinging yellow caution tape and fake spiders on the front of their house: “Start with something that excites you, that you love, because you’re gonna spend a lot of time on it and it’s going to be in your yard for a long time. Use all the space you’ve got. A lot of folks tend to put some stuff right in the front of their house, but you can come forward, you can go in your parkway, you can go inside your house, you can have stuff falling out of your house.”
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